There were several women in positions of authority on Obama’s campaign team — but his testosterone-fueled Chicago operation was so male-dominated, one female aide to Republican John McCain accused the campaign of “boys’ club bullying … better suited for a frat house than a serious campaign about serious issues.”

Obama’s campaign manager, top spokesman and chief strategist will once again be male, but two women, Julianna Smoot and Jen O’Malley Dillon, have been picked as deputy campaign managers, essentially sharing the number two job in what promises to be a billion-dollar campaign.

Smoot, with her gilded fundraising connections and networking skills, is tasked with mobilizing a nationwide network of power players. O’Malley Dillon, a former top party official, is helping build the dozens of state organizations needed to activate Obama’s grass-roots support.

Both will bear significant day-to-day operational responsibilities, and they will alternate running the Chicago headquarters when campaign manager Jim Messina is on one of his frequent road trips, a senior campaign official told POLITICO.

Their titles and the roles they will play — along with the choice of Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee — are a tacit acknowledgment of past shortcomings and a recognition the Obama effort has to better reflect a crucial voting bloc this time around.

While the White House downplayed the notion that the two women were placed at the forefront of the campaign because of their gender — “Julianna and Jen are in top positions because they are two of the best in the business, not because they are women,” said Jen Psaki, the White House deputy communications director — the symbolism has not been lost on those outside the campaign.

“They’ve lived with the criticism for a few years now that they’re a boys’ club,” said one top Democratic consultant. “I think they felt the pressure all along to get more women in the mix, and now there’s a definite shift.”

“They needed it,” added Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida. “They desperately need women to have more of a presence visually in the same way that Donna Brazile was omnipresent for [Al] Gore and the way so many aides were for Hillary. They’re learning the lesson that you’ve got to have women in high places.”

Smoot and O’Malley Dillon are hardly newcomers to Team Obama. They proved themselves in critical — though relatively low-profile roles — during the 2008 campaign.

Smoot, a charm dispenser with a rolling North Carolinian drawl, helped bring in a record-shattering $745 million as finance director during the 2008 cycle and was later recruited to serve as White House social secretary after a highly publicized security breach ruined Obama’s first state dinner.

“When there’s any kind of problem, nobody is better than Julianna at fixing it, and she proved that as social secretary,” said a senior administration official who has worked alongside Smoot.

O’Malley Dillon, a veteran of four presidential campaigns, was battleground states director for Obama before serving for the past two years as executive director at the DNC.

Anita Dunn, the former White House communications director who served as a strategist on the 2008 campaign — and with Valerie Jarrett, was one of its highest ranking women — said the new roles for Smoot and O’Malley Dillon are a “recognition of two of the best women in the campaign” who worked their way up the ladder in “a pretty traditional way.”

And while Dunn, who has privately pushed for including more women in the campaign and the White House, echoed Psaki in saying Smoot and O’Malley Dillon didn’t land their new jobs because of their gender, she added:

“The president does value having different points of view at the table. And it’s clearly a good thing to have a diversity of voices.”

Jarrett, a White House senior adviser, made the same point. “The president always looks for the most talented people, and Jen and Julianna are two of the very best,” she said. “They have proven track records and results. Of course, I am delighted to see Jen [and] Julianna, together with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, take on senior roles in the campaign.”

While their titles are the same, Smoot and O’Malley Dillon will have entirely different roles under Messina.

Smoot, 43, is the one with the golden Rolodex, the connection to Democratic fundraisers and the ability to “make it rain,” as one donor put it. O’Malley Dillon, a 34-year-old, fast-talking Massachusetts native who has spent much of her adult life on the road, is the resident expert on campaign field operations.

Frank White, an Obama donor, said Smoot is able to operate effectively because she is “very unassuming.”

“She can sneak up on you,” he said. “She’s not in your face, and she certainly doesn’t knock you out.”

These days, Smoot is reconnecting with campaign volunteers, state party leaders and interest groups across the country. Although she said in an interview that she won’t be as “laser focused” on raising money this cycle, she still sits in on fundraising calls as needed. “When I can help, I do,” she said.

O’Malley Dillon’s focus right now is on analyzing data from previous elections.

“We are spending a lot of time making sure we understand what happened state-by-state and community-by-community in 2008 and 2010 and working through our plans to build unique and strategic operations in key states across the country,” she said.

Both women have been focused on North Carolina, for example. Recently, as O’Malley Dillon combed through districts in the state, Smoot led a conference call with Democratic leaders and grass-roots supporters there.

Both say they have spent time creating a budget and dealing with personnel.

And those who know them say they are more alike than different. “They’re both hard-charging, type A women who know what they want and how to get it,” one friend said.

That could be a recipe for disaster, the friend said, but “they get along very well.”

Colleagues joke that Smoot and O’Malley Dillon — who didn’t know each other very well before this campaign — are not morning people and live on coffee. The biggest difference, as O’Malley Dillon put it, is that “I’m a Yankee from her perspective, and I think she is a southern genteel.”

And their presence at the upper level of the campaign represents a marked difference from 2008.

“It was pretty boys’-clubby [before], and I think it’s something that needed to happen,” said a former Obama campaign aide who has worked on other campaigns that had bigger representations of women. “At the end of the day, women have different experiences than men and can look at issues in a different way. They need to be in the room when decisions are made. It makes a difference.”

Even with Dunn, Jarrett and Penny Pritzker, the hotel heiress who served as Obama’s national finance chair, involved in key decisions, the 2008 Obama campaign quietly acknowledged it had a gender problem.

As it geared up for the general election, it brought in O’Malley Dillon; Linda Douglass, who became a senior adviser and traveling press secretary and Patti Solis Doyle, who became vice presidential candidate Joe Biden’s chief of staff after serving as Clinton’s first campaign manager.

But the “boys’ club” stereotype followed the campaign to the White House, where high-ranking women like Jarrett and assistant to the president and deputy senior adviser Stephanie Cutter have been the exception.

That vacuum came into play this year to during the selection of a new press secretary to replace Gibbs and a DNC head to replace former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine. Some thought longtime Democratic aide Karen Finney should take the podium job, and there was an internal debate over whether Wasserman Schultz should get the top job at the DNC.

But the Obama 2012 campaign seems likely to have its fair share of women in the upper ranks, with the addition of Ann Marie Habershaw as the campaign’s chief operating officer, Elizabeth Lowery as deputy finance director, Katie Hogan as deputy press secretary and others who are expected to be named soon.

Jane Hall, an associate professor of communication at American University, said it’s “important symbolically and practically” to have women in the upper ranks of the campaign.

“If Obama is to present himself as someone who is representative of all groups in this country, his team needs to reflect that more than [it has] in the past,” Hall said. “From a perception standpoint as well as a reality standpoint, they need a diverse group of people in the room — especially since they’ve had a bad rap as being a boys’ club.”

“It does matter” to women, Hall said. “It matters if you’re a woman and you see yourself reflected in the management of the campaign.”

But Julian Zelizer, a professor of public affairs and history at Princeton University, said that while a diverse political team would be appealing to both men and women, in the end, “Obama’s most important appeal to Democratic women will have to revolve around his policies.”

“He will have to present his record, from health care to stimulus, as one that best meets the needs and hopes of female voters in the Democratic Party,” he said.

The campaign — or Smoot and O’Malley Dillon, at least — seems well aware of that notion. As they attempt to help rebuild the 2008 powerhouse operation in the face of a struggling economy and two wars, they know they also need to try something new.

“You can’t recreate something the way it was done before,” O’Malley Dillon said. “We need to run the race like it’s a new race. Now that you don’t have that magical moment [of 2008]. You need to give people a reason to be invested.”